Basic Evergreen Install is Working

Yesterday, I worked on installing Evergreen and PostgreSQL. It took some time but overall went smoother than I was expecting.

I ran into a little difficulty with PostgreSQL. The Evergreen documentation assumed I was going install it from source as, apparently, at the time the documentation was written, the Linux distros weren't supporting the correct versions as installable packages. However, I had no problem finding a PostgreSQL 8.4 package. This installed beautifully and I merrily continued on my way until step 11a. Then, I got this message:

createlang: language installation failed: ERROR: could not access file "$libdir/plperl": No such file or directory

I showed it to my husband and he suggested I was missing a required PostgreSQL package which was indeed the case. In addition to the basic package, I also had to install postgresql-plperl-8.4 and postgresql-contrib. After those two additional packages were installed, I didn't run into any further problems with the PostgreSQL configuration.

I also had a bit of trouble near the very end when I was trying to start Evergreen. After typing in osrf_ctl.sh -l -a start_all, I got a message similar to this:

Use of uninitialized value $@ in concatenation (.) or string at
/usr/local/share/perl/5.10.1/OpenSRF/Transport/SlimJabber/Client.pm line
152.
Exception: OpenSRF::EX::Jabber 2011-05-19T11:25:34
OpenSRF::Transport::SlimJabber::Client
/usr/local/share/perl/5.10.1/OpenSRF/Transport/SlimJabber/Client.pm:152
Jabber Exception: Could not authenticate with Jabber server:

After a little searching, I found a post saying that if you got this error, opensrf_core.xml hadn't been configured with the correct passwords for ejabberd. This made perfect sense once I thought about it. During the initial opensrf configuration, I had added the appropriate passwords to this file. However, as part of the Evergreen install the documentation told me replace the opensrf_core.xml file I had added the password to with an example file. I'm still not sure why it told me to do this. Maybe there is a difference between the two file but if so, it would have been helpful to have an explicit reminder to add the passwords back in again.

These were the only two issues I ran into. Installing Evergreen was certainly more straightforward than a lot of other installs I've tried to work my way through. The 2.0 documentation seems a little sparse at the moment but when I had questions, I went back to the 1.6 documentation and usually found my answer.

At this point, I've verified that both the staff client and OPAC are accessible. My next step is to start configuring the Evergreen settings for locations, circ policies, staff users, etc. I've briefly glanced through the staff interface and decided that it's different enough from Horizon that I'm going to need the documentation in order to figure out the best way to set everything up. It should be fun :)

OpenSRF Installed

My husband created a Linux VM for me on his server that's running Ubuntu Lucid Lynx. I have a sneaking suspicion that he is supporting this endeavor solely in the hopes of having our personal library cataloged in a real ILS.

Today, I finally started the actual installation for Evergreen. I'm following the directions for the Evergreen 2.0 documentation and got through the OpenSRF instructions. There were a couple of times I wasn't sure exactly what it meant. For instance, in the "Create configuration files for users needing srfsh" section, I didn't know which users it thought would need the configuration files. Later on, it became apparent due to a test command that it thought root was one of those users. However, it was easy enough to go back and add the file for root and things went swimmingly after that. Overall, OpenSRF installed much easier than I expected. Hopefully the rest of the install continues as smoothly.

More Documentation

I'm still reading documentation. Given the time period since my last post, that sounds like I've gone through reams of documentation but I haven't. It turns out that one hour a week isn't that much time. However, I suppose an hour is still better than no time.

I am a little bemused by the variety of "you can" and "if you wish" suggestions I'm running into. Such as "If you wish to include support for Python and Java . . . " At the moment, I'm not sure if this is just a friendly FYI or an actual suggestion. Until I learn otherwise, I'll probably treat it as the latter.

I am surprised by how detailed the documentation is, at least for the parts I've read so far. I was expecting something more along the lines of "these are the files you need, now go install them." Instead they're giving line-by-line commands.

Documentation

It was probably a bad idea to try and start a personal development project right before vacation and then family visiting. However, at this moment, life is mostly back to normal. I haven't done much thinking about Evergreen other than knowing that I'll want to install at least 2.0 or later. As I understand it, this is the first version that provides acquisitions. Acquisitions is a big deal for my library and is one reason we didn't consider Evergreen the last time we looked at ILS options.

My husband is going to hook me up with an Ubuntu VM to load Evergreen. Until he has a chance to do that, I'm going to read documentation. When I first started as a Horizon sys admin I didn't have a clue what I was doing so I sat down and read the manuals from cover to cover. Maybe that's a little weird but it seemed to work. So, I'm going to try this with Evergreen also. I've already realized there's a bit of difference between documentation provided by a proprietary vendor and documentation created by the proselytizing users. However, it's a place to start. I've also subscribed to a couple of Evergreen-related blogs. Eventually, I'll probably end up subscribing to one or more of the mailing lists but I think those might be a little overwhelming at first.

Expanding My ILS Experience

I've been the Integrated Library System (ILS) administrator at my library district since 2005. I started about 6 months after the district had migrated from Dynix to Horizon. Almost a decade ago I installed Koha on my home computer. However, other than that brief episode, I only have experience with Horizon.

There are many things I dislike about Horizon but there are also a number of features that I think are great. For instance, I love that all my data is in a standard database. It sounds like such a simple thing but in the library world it's best not to take the simple things in life for granted. While an end of life date hasn't been set for Horizon, it's no longer in active development*. However, at some point, our district is going to have to migrate to another ILS.

A couple of days ago I was thinking about the prospect of moving to a new system and all the new ways of doing things I'll have to learn. I decided that I needed practice with a wider range of library systems than I currently have. As a result, I've decided to install Evergreen on a home computer and play with it a bit. I hope that learning a new ILS is like learning a new language. The first couple are hard but the more practice you have the easier it gets.

Why Evergreen? It's extremely unlikely that our district would migrate to Evergreen. However, it's open source so it's relatively easy for me to get my hands on it. Also, within the last couple of years, I've seen more large systems migrate to Evergreen than Koha, the other large open source ILS. If my Evergreen experience goes well, I might decide to dabble with Koha also.

* That's the official statement but recently we've been getting bug fixes released more than once a year as well as getting international customizations integrated into the main code base.